Last weekend Rockaway Beach’s Fort Tilden opened its gates to a crowd of art connoisseurs, local creatives, and bronzed beach goers for a day of art and activism supporting Rockaway Beach. The Rockaway Artists Alliance and the National Parks Service hosted the hordes of art lovers who came to witness the opening of the site specific art installations (on view through September 1st), a free open-air performance by rock legend Patti Smith, and a Walt Whitman poetry reading by hipster heartthrob... [more]

That day, the Yellow Emperor showed the poet his palace. They left behind, in long succession, the first terraces on the west which descend, like the steps of an almost measureless amphitheater, to a paradise or garden whose metal mirrors and intricate juniper hedges already prefigured the labyrinth. They lost themselves in it, gaily at first, as if condescending to play a game, but afterwards not without misgiving, for its straight avenues were subject to a curvature, ever so slight, but con... [more]

The art we make today – frequently fractured and scattered – often assumes that older and more unified ways of thinking have been either lost entirely or are being replaced. Neïl Beloufa’s current show at Francois Ghebaly's new space takes a different, perhaps more honest approach. His film Kempinski, shot in Mali completely unscripted and simply allowing people in Mali a moment to speak, reveals animist, ancient ways of thinking coexisting in a modern world, and this truth about the world can... [more]

Los Angeles, Aug. 2009 - I hate superlatives. But at twenty-four-years old, French-Algerian artist Neil Beloufa has made with his work, Kempinski, 2007, likely one of the best pieces of video art I may have ever seen. Dubious superlatives asides, his work has circled both the film festival circuit and gallery exhibitions collecting dozens of awards and vociferous praise.
Working in the contradictory genre of “ethnological sci-fi documentary,” the video portrays a series of Malian men simply s... [more]

When you're in Amsterdam make sure to stop by the Netherlands Institute for Media Art--it's free with your museum card and during the Stedelijk hiatus provides the one of the only contemporary counterpoints to the works of the Dutch Masters which you probably would have exhausted yourself with. The current exhibition there, Into the Unknown, is a hyper-contemporary look at the translation of science through art and science-fiction. Give yourself plenty of time to have a seat and watch t... [more]